Immersive Telepresence (ITP) systems (e.g., CTS 3000 and TX 9000 commercially available from Cisco Systems, Inc.) typically use a cluster of high-resolution (HD) cameras with fixed fields of view (FOVs) to capture multiple seating segments in a room (see FIG. 1A). The camera FOVs are combined or cascaded such that when images are displayed on screens of a remote ITP system, they appear as if taken from a single camera with an ultra-wide FOV. There is typically no overlap of FOVs between adjacent cameras capturing images.
Despite the simplicity of providing cameras with non-overlapping FOVs in ITP environments, this limits the seating arrangement in an ITP room, since a person seated across two FOVs from two cameras will appear partially in two images (and an incomplete image or a slightly distorted image of the person may appear in the cascaded view displayed, e.g., by a remote system). In order to prevent the occurrence of such a scenario, typical ITP rooms use purposely built tables with physical constraints, referred to as “knee lockers”, to limit the seating arrangement around tables within the ITP room (so as to prevent any person from being located between the adjacent FOVs of two cameras).